Oldham, new problems

Canvassing in a litter-strewn central Oldham cul-de-sac, Kamran Ghafoor knocks on doors which do not open. No matter. He has good reason to be optimistic, hundreds of them in fact: addresses drenched in green on his clipboard are the homes that have pledged him their vote, while the odd flecks of amber and red have not.

Ghafoor is leader of the Oldham Group, a breakaway party courting the town’s once reliably Labour Muslim voters who now outnumber whites in several wards. The 47-year-old has promised Oldhamers a Muslim cemetery with prompt Islamic burials, graves facing Mecca and no dogs. Predominantly Asian wards, if all goes to plan, will also be exempt from fines for parking on the pavements of cramped inner-city streets.

Ghafoor scoffs at the suggestion his pledges carry a whiff of sectarianism. “We’re probably more British than some of the British are. I’m very patriotic. I’m King and Country, and always have been. I used to go to a Catholic school.” Later in the day, he recites the Our Father fluently. “Then again, I am a Muslim. And I’m a Muslim first.” He wears his contradictions lightly. Who would he support in cricket — England or Pakistan? “You got me there, Michael,” he says through a raspberry laugh. “But you know, football, it’s England all the way.”

Independent, Muslim-first parties like Ghafoor’s have proliferated across the country, partly in response to the Gaza war. They are expected to make breakthroughs in the local elections in Oldham, Burnley, Blackburn, Kirklees, Rochdale, Birmingham, Newham, and to take control of Redbridge, east London. They are also forecast to form the largest party in Bradford council. In these areas, parties of this kind are counterbalanced by a centuries-old but crumbling Labour consensus, and the arrival of Reform, who are expected to make inroads primarily among disaffected white voters.

On St George’s Day, white Oldhamers sun themselves outside Wetherspoons, largely neglecting the takeaway restaurants, barbers and jewellery shops. Four tables, picked at random, say they intend to vote Reform. “I’m not really political,” says one man, who wished to remain anonymous. “But this country is as bad as I’ve ever seen it.” What was once Oldham’s town hall is now a Costa Coffee. At its entrance, a quotation from Winston Churchill, the town’s MP at the turn of the 20th century, is etched into the paving slabs. “We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us.” Across the road, towering over that sentence, is Cafe East, a Punjabi restaurant housed on a site that had for the best part of two centuries been a pub. The building’s owner is Kamran Ghafoor.

After reshaping many of Oldham’s buildings, he now wants the keys to the town. Oldham council’s budget runs into the hundreds of millions. Locals tell me that budget has long been transactional. Labour party patronage has been dispensed through clan elders who delivered votes in return. Most of those elders and their descendants hail from Mirpur, a region of Kashmir partially submerged during the construction of a dam in the 1960s. Most of those displaced by the flood thought they would some day return. Few did. More often their relatives joined them in Britain. Eventually, even the dead stayed put. Up to the 1990s many Pakistani migrants opted to be buried back home. “As new generations were born here, they see this as home,” said Abdul Wahid, the Oldham Group’s deputy leader. “They even want their parents to be buried here so they can visit them, rather than go to a foreign country.”

As Oldham’s white population contracts — from 91 per cent in 1991 to 68 per cent today — the town feels increasingly auctionable. The contest can be a dangerous business. A car belonging to Arooj Shah, the current council leader, was fire-bombed in 2021; the car of another council candidate was similarly torched earlier this year, causing him to bow out of the campaign. A pig’s head was thrown into a former councillor’s window. No arrests have been made, and, in the absence of evidence, everyone from Oldham Labour, the far-right and rival Mirpuri clans have been fingered as suspects. Like other areas where independents are making inroads, notably in Birmingham, the borders between politics and crime are hazy. In Oldham, the council leader’s brother is a convicted money launderer. Her childhood friend, Mohammed Imran Ali, born in Dublin and known locally as “Irish Imy,” was a onetime driver for Dale Cregan, who murdered two policewomen with handguns and grenades in 2013. Imy’s résumé has proved no barrier to his running as an independent on a campaign to “Make Oldham Great Again.”

When I call Imy to ask which great period he has in mind, he says he will get back to me. He doesn’t. Nor did most of the Labour councillors I contacted. I bumped into Arooj Shah, the Labour council leader on her way to a funeral. Sheepishly, she gave me a number that appears to be another councillor’s. “Try getting hold of a councillor or seeing Arooj at a surgery,” laughs one Mirpuri resident in St Mary’s, the Labour leader’s ward. No one I spoke to there could.

Apart from exasperation with Labour, the Oldham Group has ridden a wave of indignation over the Gaza war. “That changed everything,” one Mirpuri resident tells me of Keir Starmer’s support for Israel. Ghafoor and other formerly Conservative councillors were reprimanded for attending a pro-Palestine march in London on Armistice Day in November 2023, two weeks into Israel’s ground offensive. Rather than attend mandatory diversity training, they formed their own party. The pull of the Ummah, or global Islamic community, tugged harder than party political loyalties and the clan-structures underpinning them. That trend, which replicated last year in Gorton and Denton, when Labour lost a 100-year-old seat to a Green party draped in the Palestine flag, threatens to flip much of what is not tied down on the Left of British politics.

At a cafe in Royton, a predominantly white area decked out in St George’s bunting, soup-bowl-sized coffees and complimentary samosas arrive at our table. Raja Miah, a controversial blogger and grooming gang campaigner, offers a brief elegy to Oldham of old, more homogenous and “full of lovely people,” and then gets to the point. “Gaza happened and it’s bit Labour in the bum, hasn’t it,” he says. “They wouldn’t call it war crimes. The consequence of that is you’ve got four [Gaza] MPs now and an entire Muslim movement that was entirely aligned with the Labour party that’s either now independent, toyed with the Worker’s Party, or has found a home in the Green party.” The independents can only get so far, he says. “They don’t have enough votes. They need white allies, and the Green party is the most natural. You saw that play out in Gorton and Denton. What you’re seeing at a national level now is just an amplification of what’s been bubbling over locally for some time.”

The Greens, like Labour before them, are but one vehicle for Muslim-first voters in an increasingly sectarian field

The Oldham Group’s success — nine councillors and counting in a chamber of sixty — suggests the Greens, like Labour before them, are but one vehicle for Muslim-first voters in an increasingly sectarian field. Their similarities with Reform are something neither group would care to admit. Both groups profess conservatism of a kind, while each has its own free speech concerns, with Reform exercised over “Islamophobia,” and Oldham Group, the IHRA antisemitism definition, which was adopted by the last Conservative government in 2018. Both campaign on issues over which local councils have no control, whether the grievance be in Dover or the Levant. Brian Hobin, the council’s deputy mayor, puts their momentum down to “disillusionment” and voters who “can’t differentiate between national and local politics.” He adds: “As a local councillor you’re not going to be stopping boats. And there’s not a lot we can do with Gaza.”

What neither party’s opponents seem willing to acknowledge is that these conflicts are, in the eyes of those waging them, entirely legitimate. That they happen to also be zero-sum is not unprecedented. Ghafoor recalls attending protests as a child against the publication of the Satanic Verses. He hasn’t budged since. Insulting the Prophet Mohammed is unacceptable, no matter the longstanding English commitment to free expression that such protests offend in turn. Like Ghafoor, Oldham appears better at professing multiculturalism than practising it. During the 2001 race riots, it was after all a pub called “Live and Let Live” that was firebombed. Walking through the town centre, I pass an arcade of boarded-up shops. The signage overhead reads: “THIS IS A LOVE WHERE YOU LIVE ALLEY.” Sectarianism did not arrive in Oldham from Gaza. The Oldham Group are merely attempting, like Labour, to bend it to their own purposes.

The town’s white majority, such as it is, cannot be entirely ignored. The Oldham Group’s campaign pledges include support for the national inquiry into the grooming gangs, framed as justice for “ALL children affected by sexual exploitation.” The scourge of a particular crime, involving predominantly Pakistani perpetrators and white victims, is thus fudged into a platitude. Yet the party has outflanked Labour councillors, many of whom are also Mirpuri Pakistanis, in full-throated calls for a local and national inquiry armed with statutory powers to compel witnesses. Addressing the council last year, Cllr Wahid, the Oldham Group’s deputy leader, said: “For too long, those demanding justice have been accused of being far-right and racist. I reject this framing… we shall not make excuses, we will not stand for silence.” The speech seemed heartfelt – as close to a communal mea culpa as a man in his position could make. Yet the line is also expedient: official reports found “serious failings” of successive Labour-led councils while abuse was ongoing, including the council’s employment of the leader of the Rochdale grooming gang for nearly two decades. Labour’s brass are naturally squeamish about the arrival to Oldham of an inquiry that may, as one Mirpuri Oldham Group supporter put it, “open a can of worms.” As for the criminals, whoever they may be? “They should be castrated,” says Ghafoor.

Older generations who took political instruction from their elders — gatekeepers of the votes of large extended families, offered in return for the Labour party’s patronage — are being undercut by younger men, untarnished by power and armed with a more romantic vision of global Islamic solidarity. In an afterword to A History of Oldham, first published in 1949, John Stafford noted how the advent of television had transformed the town. “We can travel home through familiar, or is it un-familiar, Sholver, Glodwick, Werneth or Hollins passing neighbours and friends, then — within seconds — the vivid streets of Los Angeles, an adventure in Rome, the elections in France.” Today, scenes of mangled places and people are transmitted from Gaza to those same streets each day via TikTok and Facebook, nudging the concerns of Muslims across Britain away from the local and towards what many increasingly feel is a common struggle. “An attack on one is an attack on all,” as one resident put it.

No alcohol is served at Shimlas, a Punjabi restaurant in Oldham town centre. “Go on, try eating with your hands,” Ghafoor says, chiding my doner-etiquette. He owns the building, and the two next door. A handshake purchase of King’s Hall, a former shoe market, has produced three lettable units. Last year one collapsed, injuring 40 people. His rivals call him a slum landlord, a hard charge to rebuff given he has been fined for neglecting to maintain rented properties. “Why would I want my own building to collapse?” he asks, as we walk over to the black Ferrari at the back of the restaurant.

Before we set off, he tells me that Irish Imy recently bought a small fountain in the form of a peeing cherub. He posted it online, placing a picture of Ghafoor’s face over the head and naming it “Tiny Timmy” — he almost laughs, confiding it’s a reference to the size of his manhood. Then we speed off. He plays rap songs dissing his council rivals as we tour his property empire. “Look at those vanity projects,” he says, nodding towards the council’s half-finished Spindles shopping centre. Passing through his neighbourhood, he points to the semi-detached streets where his family clusters, 70 or 80 relatives within a few minutes’ walk. “It used to be teachers and doctors living here,” he says. He means white ones. Marshalling a hundred votes on these streets might just be an easier task than Reform gaining ten in Oldham’s majority-white outer ring. This week, in dozens of towns like this one, we will find out.